You may also be interested in the following articles...

Thai Airways is approaching a critical juncture as it completes a restructuring and seeks to resume growth. Its home market offers opportunities and an envious growth rate, but intensifying competition creates challenges.

Thai Airways is sandwiched between rapidly expanding low cost airlines and ambitious Gulf airlines. Its multi-brand strategy has so far proven to be a less than sufficient response.

Asia-Europe, which is one of IATA's big four international markets, has become the slowest-growing. The market underwent RPK expansion of only 1.5% in Jul-2016, the latest data available. Uncertainty in Europe and terrorism fears mean that some Asian travellers choose Australia and North America or, as IATA has flagged – travel within Asia, which has expanded by nearly double digits.

Although market expansion was slow in the first part of 2016, so too was capacity. Yet this changed in Jul-2016 as capacity increased more quickly, perhaps as airlines expected a stronger summer. Despite slow passenger growth, dynamics are highly varied – except for yield declines. The combined RPK growth of IAG (7.2%) Cathay Pacific (3.7%) and Finnair (8.7%) was not enough to offset the contraction of the largest airline in the market, AF-KLM (7.9%).

From the reported geographic data by all major airlines, load factors are falling.